How do I get started in Electronic Circuit Engineering?

I have been teaching my self the basics of Electronics in the past month and I think that I am far enough along that I want to start teaching my self what goes into a circuit.

I understand the fundamental stuff, the basic parts and pieces and now I am trying to find some books that explains a circuit.

Take for example a 2 transistor LED flasher. I can build this circuit from memory and is simple enough and you can find many diagrams of it on the web. What I cannot find is someplace that explains step by step the processes occurring that make it actually flash.

The above mentioned circuit is simple enough for me to understand what is going on, but I am not talking about that one circuit in particular.

I guess what I am after is a guide that teaches me how to read what a circuit is doing, and for what purpose a component is needed for in a circuit.

I hope I was clear in my question, I wasn't really sure exactly how to ask.

Did you make this instructable?

Rachel recently posted about a free online course provided by MIT about circuits and electronics. I signed up myself. It started this week but maybe you can still sign up. See her original post here: https://www.instructables.com/community/Free-undergraduate-EE-course-from-MIT/

Thankfully math comes pretty easily to me. I can see that there are a lot of formulas for figuring out what a circuit is doing. However that is all just a bunch of figures unless I understand why those figures are important to the design of a circuit.

Thanks, I got that book just the other day. It is a little dry but there seems to be a lot of good information in it about transistors. Also as for the "what makes it flash?" part; I will try to explain how I think it works.

Using the diagram I uploaded to this post.

What happens is that when the base of Q1 goes Low the current is redirected to the base of Q2 causing it to go High. The capacitors for each base keeps the collector current flowing until it drops below the base threshold at which point the current redirects to the other base and the capacitor starts to charge again.

Rinse and Repeat.

Sorry if that is hard to understand. Now that I am thinking about it seriously I find that I only have a partial understanding.

Please feel free to correct me on anything I missed or was wrong on. It will help me understand things better.

Thanks, this looks like basically the same thing only instead of a flip flop it is more of a chained flip flop. One question I have is what does that arrow mean just above where it says "close to start"?

There are lots of other universities jumping on this free web course band wagon. The MIT Sage mentioned is like an actual class with homework, online labs etc but there are sites dedicated to linking to online lectures.